Her peak month was June, when she tallied 35,463 messages, or about 1,182 a day. Assuming she slept eight hours a day, that's about 74 messages an hour, or roughly one coming or going each minute.

"Heyy," Emilee Cox wrote when asked by a Sentinel reporter about her texting through, you guessed it, a text message. "Uhm i'm not sure really. In june i had cheer camp so like alot of my friends had texted me. And when i wasn't at camp i'd text my friends and girls on my team. i don't like talking on the phone so i'd prefer texting people.

"Well it's different things with different people," she wrote. "Like with my cheer friends we talk about cheerleading. Then with friends from school and stuff we'd talk about how our summers were and what we expected high school to be like. And my boyfriend and i talk about random things. He's the main reason my texting is so high becuz we're constantly texting. Lol"

Just before Christmas, Emilee wore out her phone because she was texting so much. Her father switched her to a different provider and got her a phone without a keyboard.

That slowed her texting down a little -- she sent 14,083 in December.

As long as his daughter, a ninth-grader, keeps getting good grades at East Ridge High School, he'll let her keep on texting.

"I think there are much worse habits for her to have," said Cox, who clocked 656 text messages of his own in June. "It keeps her from being bored, and it keeps her out of trouble."

Kristin Wallace, a spokeswoman for Sprint, confirmed Emilee's text tally and said Sprint customers average 268 messages a month.

"It's absolutely amazing," Wallace said. "She must have been texting day and night."

A study by Nielsen found that kids ages 13 to 17 on average send and receive 1,742 messages monthly.

Cox might think his daughter has the fastest fingers around, but she's not even close. A man in India reportedly had 182,689 text messages in a month.

Etan Horowitz can be reached at ehorowitz@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5447.